The Island is indeed an actor's play, for acting is its central metaphor and idea: acting as a means for the acting out of one's life, acting as a form of survival, and acting as a basis for (political) action.
In The Island, two black prisoners, John and Winston, are men whose political stands against the state have caused them to be incarcerated, sentenced without determinable end in Robben Island prison. They are dressed in shorts "to look like the boys their keepers would make them." But clearly the authorities wish them to be far, far less than boys, for the prisoners are treated with extreme brutality and are given the sorts of tasks meant to reduce them from men to beasts, to annihilate the last shreds of their humanity.
Their humanity, however, remains intact and it does so because the two men continue to act as humans by using dramatic acting as the means for sustaining their humanity. Improvisation becomes the means through which John and Winston understand and practice their humanity.
The opening actions of The Island provide a painful, moving dumb show from which the drama that follows can be built. The extended mime of John and Winston's labours with wheelbarrow and sand shows the dehumanising, pointless tedium of life on Robben Island. With the blast of a second whistle, the transfer of sand concludes and a new mime commences. This time John and Winston are handcuffed, joined at the ankles, and forced to run in tandem. A subhuman race is portrayed, "They start to run ... John mumbling a prayer, Winston muttering a rhythm for their three-legged run" Rather than reducing them to despair or turning them into tortured animals, it serves to evoke the very things that raise men above bestiality manifested in John...
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...sland, John and Winston present their Antigone play, but it is a presentation informed on the one hand by John's and now Winston's comprehension of the Antigone legend as an archetype of resistance, and on the other by their understanding of the Sisyphus legend in much the way that Camus understood it. And in his last scene, Fugard pulls out all his stops to create a coup de théâtre that is not an end in itself but a subversive means to enlightenment and political engagement. Brian Crow astutely writes, "[T]he ability to `act,' to assume a new identity however temporarily, is here as in Sizwe Bansi a form of self-protection and a strategy for survival, allowing its exponent as well as its audience (the real one as well as the imagined prison audience) to achieve an understanding and a renewed commitment to struggle in spite of the horror of the situation."44
The play, “Riley Valentine and the Occupation of Fort Svalbard”, by Julia- Rose Lewis is an exploration of the resilience of teenagers. The play is heavily symbolic and supports the dramatic meaning of the show. Throughout the Queensland Theatre Company’s interpretation of this play, the director, Travis Dowley, expresses forms of dramatic elements to articulate three types of manipulations. These manipulations include the manipulation of body and voice, space and the creation and manipulation of dramatic mood. Through these types of manipulations, it portrays the dramatic meaning towards the performance. Although, the use of space throughout Travis’s performance allows the audience to identify this dramatic meaning.
Children these days have a variety of needs, often being surrounded by the ideas of freedom and security. While some people seek complete freedom from society’s rules, others seek the comforts of security that a normal life provides. Children’s preferences on freedom and security are reflected from their Mom and Dad’s parenting style. In The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls, the characters Brian, Lori, and Jeannette show that while growing they would rather have security over freedom because they repeatedly find themselves in a state of danger due to their parent’s lack of security. For example, if Jeannette’s parents were accountable while Jeanette was in proximity to fire she would not have been traumatized and severely burnt. Another reason the children want security is Rex is an excessive alcoholic who is very dangerous to be around while he is under the influence of hard liquor, they would rather a father that responsibly handled alcohol. Rex’s surplus of expenses on booze led the family into poverty because instead of using the family’s rare profit to pay off bills Rex uses it to buy alcohol and items that were not a necessity to their survival. Therefore, their parents struggled to give even the simplest things for them such as food and clothes.
Every individual has two lives, the life we live, and the life we live after that. Nobody is perfect, but if one works hard enough, he or she can stay away from failure. The Natural is a novel written by Bernard Malamud. It is Malamud’s first novel that initially received mixed reactions but afterwards, it was regarded as an outstanding piece of literature. It is a story about Roy Hobbs who after making mistakes in his life, he returns the bribery money and is left with self-hatred for mistakes he has done. Hobbs was a baseball player who aspired to be famous, but because of his carnal and materialistic desire, his quest for heroism failed, as he was left with nothing. In the modern world, the quest for heroism is a difficult struggle, and this can be seen through the protagonist in The Natural.
A significant aspect of the play is the acting and wardrobe, because it helps demonstrate the personalities of the characters.
Jeannette Walls, the author of the memoir, The Glass Castle, was raised by parents whose relentless nonconformity and radical ideals were both positive and negative aspects to their wellbeing. Their names were Rex and Rosemary Walls, and they were the parents of four children. While the kids were still young, the family moved from town to town, camping in the wilderness and sleeping in the car, and sometimes even had a small place to stay. Rose Mary, who was both an artist and an author, identified herself as an “excitement addict”. As a mother who despised the responsibility of caring for her family, Rose Mary preferred making a painting that will last forever over making meals for her hungry children. Rex was an alcoholic who, when sober, was a charming and intelligent man that educated his children through geology, physics, mathematics, and how to live life fearlessly.
Upon first glance, this excerpt may appear to be a simple, reactionary act of violence by the black slaves against their white oppressors. However, through a more careful and close observation of this segment, this revolt goes beyond the simple cultural divide and exposes the deeper, underlying theme of the entire novel as a whole: tyranny. Through this act, the slaves set forth a brutal cycle of tyranny and oppression, which, upon first glance, appears to be likely to lead to their liberation. And, although they do eventually receive ‘freedom’ from their imperial masters, the black inhabitants of the island are continually held down by whomever is in power at the time. In terms of this segment and chapter, the slaves see an opportunity to seize the freedom they so desperately desire and believe they deserve. However, when they do achieve this sense of freedom, which can be represented by their successful raid of the plantation house, they immediately engage in the vices of the white men by drinking the liquor in the basement and acting in an uncivil manner. The drinking of the liquor can also symbolize the fact that once power and freedom is achieved or earned, those who earn it can easily become enamored with it and abuse it. This notion is also directly displayed by the power and reign of Henri Christophe later in the
In looking back upon his experience in Auschwitz, Primo Levi wrote in 1988: ?It is naïve, absurd, and historically false to believe that an infernal system such as National Socialism (Nazism) sanctifies its victims. On the contrary, it degrades them, it makes them resemble itself.? (Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 40). The victims of National Socialism in Levi?s book are clearly the Jewish Haftlings. Survival in Auschwitz, a book written by Levi after he was liberated from the camp, clearly makes a case that the majority of the Jews in the lager were stripped of their human dignity. The Jewish prisoners not only went through a physical hell, but they were psychologically driven under as well. Levi writes, ??the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts? We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death?? (Levi, 41). One would be hard pressed to find passages in Survival in Auschwitz that portray victims of the camp as being martyrs. The treatment of the Jews in the book explicitly spells out the dehumanization to which they were subjected. It is important to look at how the Jews were degraded in the camp, and then examine whether or not they came to embody National Socialism after this.
The men who played the role of prisoner, like the guards, were selected at random. The harassment they endured, while all voluntary, was by any means less than humane. They were treated with very little respect, and denied basic rights, such as use of the restroom, and were forced to sleep on cold concrete floors for many nights as a form of punishment. When they arrived to the prison, they were stripped down, and given a change of clothes, but the “change of clothes”, was anything but what they expected to receive. They were actually dresses. The dresses were meant to emasculate the men even more than what they had been already. Rendered powerless, with lack of control of their environment, what other choice did they have than to accept what
Since the beginning of time, and for long past the unimaginable, life has begun with the pretense that death is the fate for all persons. Many have tried to escape this destiny, many have tried to alter it or postpone it; however, from the first page of every story, every word used to describe the events held closest to one’s heart brings the final sentence closer and closer. The concept of time has been perceived to be linear in nature; while we attempt to analyze the past and better our future – the majority of concern is focused on the present. We are a world of now, often forgetting what has gotten us to the current and often forgetting what we must do for the later. Past, present and future: these terms represent stories and events across generations; although, as a species, our nature hasn’t changed much during these periods. Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude critiques this trait in man – while the characters and setting may change, the stories always seem to remain the same. One Hundred Years of Solitude’s timeline exhibits these facts by adopting a cyclical concept of time. The terms past, present, and future no longer represent a boundary between ages; instead, the past is the future, the future is the present, and the present is the past. The novel is told across six generations of the Buendía family – subsequently, the reader quickly can see that the blessings and curses of one generation are not excluded from the others. Márquez raises many questions concerning the nature of man and the dealing with the destiny of death. Furthermore, the author uses a cyclical timeline to criticize the unending nature of man; the lines between past, present, and future...
Alexander Stowe is a twin, his brother is Aaron Stowe. Alex is an Unwanted, Aaron is a Wanted, and their parents are Necessaries. Alex is creative in a world where you can’t even see the entire sky, and military is the dream job for everyone and anyone. He should have been eliminated, just like all the unwanteds should have been. He instead comes upon Artimè, where he trains as a magical warrior- after a while. When he was still in basic training, and his friends were not, he got upset, he wants to be the leader, the one everyone looks up to.
Nine patriarchs found a town. Four women flee a life. Only one paradise is attained. Toni Morrison's novel Paradise revolves around the concept of "paradise," and those who believe they have it and those who actually do. Morrison uses a town and a former convent, each with its own religious center, to tell her tale about finding solace in an oppressive world. Whether fleeing inter- and intra-racial conflict or emotional hurt, the characters travel a path of self-isolation and eventual redemption. In her novel Paradise, Toni Morrison uses the town of Ruby and four broken women to demonstrate how "paradise" can not be achieved through isolation, but rather only through understanding and acceptance.
Susanna at the Beach, by Herbert Gold, presents a tale of the virtues characters admire strictly contrasting with the vices for which characters are consumed. The characterization of the main character, Susanna, is portrayed as embodying seven “heavenly virtues” including chastity, temperance, diligence, patience, kindness, humility, and charity. While the other characters in the story personify the seven “deadly sins” including lust, gluttony, sloth, wrath, envy, pride, and greed. Herbert Gold depicts a theme of virtues versus vices utilizing the literary device of characterization in Susanna at the Beach as supported by the character depiction from the biblical reference of Daniel and Susanna.
In the story, The Natural, certain characters and events are portrayed in a distinctive way that makes this story unique to other books and shows the typical writing style of the narrator. The author uses a repetitive writing technique that is impossible to overlook. The writer of this book is able to catch the reader’s eye with his concept of the importance of beautiful description. The Natural, by Bernard Malamud, uses great imagery that makes the story appealing.
One Hundred Years of Solitude is the subjective “history” of the founding family of the town of Macondo. During its early years, the town is isolated the outside world, except for a few traveling gypsies who frequent the town, selling supposedly extraordinary new technologies like ice, telescopes, and “scientific advancements” and implanting ideas of alchemy into the head of the patriarch of the Buendía family, José Arcadio Buendía. A rather impulsive and inquisitive man, he is also deeply solitary, alienating himself from other men in his obsessive investigations into the science of alchemy, taking the last of his wife, Úrsula’s, inheritance in an attempt to create gold out of other more common methods. After José Arcadio Buendía’s attempts at alchemy prove to be less than fruitful, he shifts his aspirations to finding a path back to civilization. He leads the founding men of the town on a quest to retrace their previous path to Macondo, but ultimately declares that it is surrounded by water on every side and it is impossible to regain contact with the rest of the world.
Parents tell their children to think first and act second. Most people forget this as illustrated in Yann Martel’s satire “We ate the Children Last,” written in 2004. It starts out with an operation and humans are given a pigs digestive tract to cure cancer. Because the operation made people eat garbage, they gave it to the poor At this point everybody wants to have this operation. When people started going cannibalistic, the government puts them together to eat each other. This started out as a good thing by curing cancer. After that everybody from the poor to the people administering the operation didn’t pause long enough to consider the consequences. Real world examples of people not pausing to consider the consequences are seen frequently, whether, it be on a small or big scale. Yann Martel is saying that